What I Learned When I Wrote About Abortion

By Crispin Sartwell

A few weeks ago on this page I wrote about the Unborn Victims' Act, which would make it a separate crime to harm a fetus in an assault on a pregnant woman. My feeling that that law made sense became a starting point to talk about my ambivalence on the issue of abortion.

And I used my ambivalence about abortion to try to find some ground on which pro-choice and pro-life people could agree. I think that both sides have important moral insights. It is true that a woman needs to control her own reproductive capacity and decide when she can have a child; but it is also true that at some point in pregnancy a fetus is a human being with rights of its own. I argued, for example, that there could indeed be bans on late-term and partial-birth abortion, but that abortion early in pregnancy might be made even easier through RU-486.

I also wrote that when I was 16, my 14-year-old girlfriend had an abortion. I wrote that my wife (the mother of my daughter) and my mother also have had abortions.

I ended with a call for dialogue. I found out that dialogue is impossible. Here is an example of the mail I got: "First off [sic] all, I think you know in your heart that they are murderers. You and your girlfriend chose to kill a child because you didn't have the integrity to do the right thing. You thought it was best to live a reckless sexual lifestyle and avoid the consequences by killing your own son/daughter because you were too selfish and involved in self gratification to be bothered..... Perhaps if you, your wife, mother, and slut girlfriend at 14 had any sexual discipline in the first place, you could stop killing innocent children for the privilege of living like animals."

Sir, I swear by the God of hatred you worship that I will endeavor never to agree with you about anything. Like almost everyone else, my girlfriend of 25 years ago, my mother, my wife and I are trying to live rightly in a difficult world, and we have made some hard decisions and some wrong decisions. I commend your perfection, but I revile your fear and your rage, and deny that they are a good basis for an ethics.

Consider this: "You deny that you/your wife and mother are murderers simply on the basis of your emotional . . . affiliation. . . . Using such a "standard" would allow Hitler's mother (or his admirers) to deny that he was the progenitor of the Holocaust, or Jeffrey Dahmer's mother . . to refuse to believe he was a serial killer and a cannibal, or allow them to deny the impropriety of such actions."

I'm not sure how persuasive this gentleman thinks it is likely to be to compare my mother - a moralist if ever there was one - to Adolf Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Here's another sample, coming at the end of another rant accusing the people I love and admire of murder: "I take the point that you learned very early from your mother how to get rid of a grave personal responsibility because it was so inconvenient. Perhaps your mother started too late or stopped too soon with her penchant for abortion."

Every pro-choice response I got was thoughtful and human. And to be fair, some of the pro-life responses were too.

But I am much more clearly pro-choice now than when I began. I refuse to be associated with self-appointed spokesmen for God, so choked by their own judgment, hatred, and rage - or by the judgment, hatred, and rage of their satanic divinity - that they are incapable of conversation.